====== BASH - Files - Read a file - Troubleshooting - Files lack their final newlines ======

===== My text files are broken!  They lack their final newlines! =====

If there are some characters after the last line in the file (or to put it differently, if the last line is not terminated by a newline character), then **read** will read it but return false, leaving the broken partial line in the read variable(s).

You can process this after the loop:

<code bash>
# Emulate cat.
while IFS= read -r line; do
  printf '%s\n' "$line"
done < "$file"
[[ -n $line ]] && printf %s "$line"
</code>

or:

<code bash>
# This does not work:
printf 'line 1\ntruncated line 2' | while read -r line; do echo $line; done

# This does not work either:
printf 'line 1\ntruncated line 2' | while read -r line; do echo "$line"; done; [[ $line ]] && echo -n "$line"

# This works:
printf 'line 1\ntruncated line 2' | { while read -r line; do echo "$line"; done; [[ $line ]] && echo "$line"; }
</code>

<WRAP info>
**NOTE:**  

The first example, beyond missing the after-loop test, is also missing quotes.

</WRAP>



----

Alternatively, you can simply add a logical OR to the while test:

<code bash>
while IFS= read -r line || [[ -n $line ]]; do
  printf '%s\n' "$line"
done < "$file"

printf 'line 1\ntruncated line 2' | while read -r line || [[ -n $line ]]; do echo "$line"; done
</code>

----